feasibility study

A key to building a rock solid business case is to understand the relationships between requirements, features, benefits and risks and to take a methodical approach to evaluating likely ROI as a key part of the process.

1. It investment should never cost you money, it is an investment and the ROI should be clear.
Build a business case professionally and then invest with confidence.
The question to ask is; who would you rather trust with your capital, your own business, some investment bank, or maybe a fund manager?

Don’t let this reference to red tape fool you. It is mission critical to understand the difference between vital process and red tape and it’s not always immediately obvious.
The key to cost cutting in any area is knowing what to cut. The word we are after is waste, but even that can be misleading. In the world of Lean everything outside of the critical value adding moment is deemed to be waste, but nobody imagines that you can eliminate most of it let alone all.

(Who’s minding the shop?) This blog is an attempt to stimulate discussion and understanding of the balance of responsibility for delivering business benefits from IT investment. It is now fairly widely recognised that this is not as simple as choosing a system, getting it working and reaping the benefits, but as yet we can call … Read more

The background is a Must-Read. Big data was announced to me in 2011 when I was busy trying to create some insight from more than 100 acquisitions of a global publisher. Back then it meant Hadoop, Nosql and instant processing as opposed to Data Warehouses, Data Marts and BI services. By 2013 the word Data … Read more

Lernaean Hydra, your time is up. Good management strategy and practice supported by intelligent modern systems Give big data the heave ho Naturally I can’t publish the whole thing if only for sheer volume, let alone sensitivity of information from some of the underlying cases, but I will pick a few areas just to demonstrate … Read more

Let’s begin with the strategy and management practices before we start talking about systems. In the last instalment, we talked about schizophrenic businesses. Businesses with confused outlooks, confused processes and naturally enough, confused systems, confused workforce, resigned customers, despairing shareholders. The five cardinal sins that create schizophrenic organisations: You have a business made up of … Read more

On Feb 26th posted a piece in which I warned readers of the dangers of buying into CLOUD solutions without due care and without attention to all the little details they would pick through if they bought a small solution from me or even from an SME or “front of mind “, big noisy solution … Read more

Not only are few of us equipped to access the best solutions, but even fewer are able to recognise when we have a problem. In technology speak a problem is closer in meaning to a mathematics problem , it doesn’t necessarily cause that irritating pain that our marketing colleagues like to focus on.

Previously Good management strategy and practice supported by intelligent modern systems Lernaean Hydra, your time is up. Give big data the heave-ho for now and get a birds-eye view of your business without a single nosql database. Here’s how we approached the solution Naturally I can’t publish the whole thing if only for sheer volume, … Read more

Bridgers must have a wider perspective than any particular application or technology set, the group says. And they need the organizational and people skills to break down barriers between IT and business – barriers such as IT jargon – and help educate business about IT and IT about business. This means they must have the confidence of both sides.

To put that in content, the earth is not round but flat and the universe is merely mirror images of the earth reflected on a layer of slightly opaque gas. The landing on the moon happened in a closed off section of MGM and hamburgers are good for you.

After all the bottom line in any busines case is going to be financial although individual stakeholder priorities and concerns will play important parts as will the organisation’s history with similar projects and even good old office politics will often play a part.

At this point I would caution that despite the importance of the figures, it would be foolish to present a business case without taking into account the stated aims of the business in it’s short and long term plans and the key performance indicators and critical success factors of the key stakeholders.

You can talk to five different people who have that word in their CV and each one will probably have a different take on what a business case is for, who should prepare it and what it should contain.
In fact, you could say that the whole science around business cases, especially those involving IT investment has moved on substantially in the past two or three years.